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Forest Leads Early on, Dalziel sets Fastest Race Lap

Jun 20, 2010
This weekend's EMCO gears classic at the Mid Ohio Sports Car Course left the #8 Corsa Car Care/Dynacor Media/Starworks Motorsport entry wondering what could have been after a mid race part failure.

After a strong qualifying effort, where the team opted to preserve tires for the race, Forest started from 9th. Twenty-five minutes into the race the first full course yellow came out and most of the leaders pitted early on to get their mandatory pit stop (in the first 45 minutes) out of the way. The #8 car took a bit of a gamble and stayed out.

Forest took the restart in the lead and quickly established a gap. Stretching his lead out over a number of laps he ran first overall until the second full course yellow came out at the 40 minute mark. At that point the team opted to perform their driver change; the timing was perfect because they only needed 1 more stop while all of the others who pitted earlier would need 2 more stops.

"It was a great drive. We knew it was going to be a great race for us. Our car was unbelievably fast all weekend. I mean, we didn't change a thing on the car all weekend and routinely found ourselves in the top 5 if not top 3 in the practices. The team did a tremendous job being prepared for this event," Forest said.

With Ryan Dalziel in the cockpit it seemed all the team needed to do was wait for their pit strategy to play itself out. But the car had other plans. On lap 60 Dalziel performed a routine downshift and suddenly the car lost power. He was forced to pull to the side of the track to wait for a tow back to the garage. At first it was thought to be a gearbox issue, but turned out to be a driveshaft (half shaft) failure.

"Even with the team's rigorous maintenance and inspections sometime you get part failures. It highlights the stress put on these vehicles. There was nothing we could have done, the team did a incredible job, but it stings a little more when it happens on a weekend like this when everything is looking perfect," Dalziel said following the race.

Perfect is a rare outlook to have in racing, but given the #8 car was on the same strategy as the eventual race winning car, lead early on and went on to set the fastest lap of the race validates that outlook. Because the car's failure happened before Dalziel had gotten his required 30 minutes on track the team performed a mid race drive shaft change to get him back out so he could get his points. With an hour to go Dalziel went out to prove a point. Setting fast lap after fast lap he eventually posted a time 3 tenths of a second quicker than the next fastest car while still losing 3 tenths to traffic on that quick lap.

While the fortunes for the #8 car took a turn for the worse, the team's sister car, the #7 Starworks entry took over the lead. Nelson Phillipe had taken over from co-driver Bill Lester and maintained the lead until the car went off in turn 1 and was forced to pit to clean out the grass from the radiator.

While the #8 Corsa Car Care/Dynacor Media car's 13th place finish hurts their championship standings it doesn't kill them. Dalziel drops from 2nd to 3rd, while Forest drops from 5th to 7th but still only 16 points away from joining his teammate in 3rd.

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